The difference is in 1979 it wasn only illegal to blaspheme against the church of England.<p>Today in more enlightened times it's illegal to make jokes about any religion, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/rowan-atkinson-attacks-proposed-terrorism-law-631693.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/rowan-atkinso...</a>
<i>The script was then rejected by every major movie studio before Idle and producer John Goldstone turned to former Beatle George Harrison, who quickly secured the required $4 million.</i><p>Right, but besides <i>Sgt. Pepper</i>, <i>Life of Brian</i>, and the invention of the CT scanner [1], what have the Beatles ever done for us?<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT_scanner#History" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CT_scanner#History</a>
"However, current tastes and sensitivities make it highly unlikely that a comedy group would even attempt making a film like Brian today"<p>It seems from the article that it was highly unlikely that a comedy group would even attempt making a film like Brian in 1979.<p>I highly recommend Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut) - it's a great documentary about Python. The author of the article appears several times.
> However, current tastes and sensitivities make it highly unlikely that a comedy group would even attempt making a film like Brian today.<p><i>Dogma</i>?
Until pretty recently, the top google result on my name for years was this 1997 haiku contest: <a href="http://orangecow.org/pythonet/haiku.html" rel="nofollow">http://orangecow.org/pythonet/haiku.html</a><p>It's interesting to me that this showed up on HN, as I remember Monty Python being a huge part of my first experiences with the internet. Before searching was so easy, I would spend hours looking up quotes, scripts, clips, and so on.<p>I might be tempted to say something else that 'Life of Brian' did for us was give people like me reasons to become more familiar with the internet, leading to careers in programming, etc.
<i>However, 30 years on, that same film is regularly touted as the funniest British comedy of all time</i><p>I love everything that Monty Python ever did, but I would hardly call Life of Brian the funniest British comedy of all time.<p>Respectfully, I disagree. I think the author overstates his case. LOB could easily be made today.